20 Inspirational Quotes About Success

How do you define success? If you're like most of us, it changes from day to day. Sometimes, it's seeing a certain number in your bank account; other times, it's being able to do what you love or give back to the world.

August 28, 2013

How do you define success? If you’re like most of us, it changes from day to day. Sometimes, it’s seeing a certain number in your bank account; other times, it’s being able to do what you love or give back to the world.

No matter where you’re at in your quest for success, these quotes will give your spirit a boost.

Do You Know What You're Worth?

1. If you have made mistakes, even serious mistakes, you may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing we call “failure” is not the falling down, but the staying down. — Mary Pickford

2. It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. — Theodore Roosevelt

3. When I dare to be powerful — to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid. — Audre Lord

4. Let no feeling of discouragement prey upon you, and in the end you are sure to succeed. — Abraham Lincoln

5. Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts. — Winston Churchill

6. Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value. — Albert Einstein

7. Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor. — Truman Capote

8. I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. — Thomas Edison

9. Nobody talks of entrepreneurship as survival, but that’s exactly what it is. — Anita Roddick

10. I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody. — Bill Cosby

11. Success is most often achieved by those who don’t know that failure is inevitable. — Coco Chanel

12. Eighty percent of success is showing up. — Woody Allen.

13. What could we accomplish if we knew we could not fail? — Eleanor Roosevelt

14. Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success. — Dale Carnegie

15. It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation. — Herman Melville

16. Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time. — George Bernard Shaw

17. If you care about what you do and work hard at it, there isn’t anything you can’t do if you want to. — Jim Henson

18. The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me. — Ayn Rand

19. I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next. — Steve Jobs

20. Don’t aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run — in the long-run, I say! — success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it. — Viktor E. Frankl

Tell Us What You Think

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On #20 – there is a line from the Bhagavat Gita that addresses this concept: “Karmanye Vadhikaarasthe ma phaleshu kadachana”. Translated: “Do your work/duty and focus not on the end result.” A powerful concept, yet an often misunderstood quote, (incorrectly) deciphered as “results don’t matter”.